Comments for [K]ayinworkshttps://kayin.moe
Game Design and Big Titty AnimeSun, 03 Dec 2017 01:42:48 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by Obscurahttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-259153
Sun, 03 Dec 2017 01:42:48 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-259153” It’s surprising, but a lot of journalists who aren’t great at a genre can still manage a good preview (I’ve experienced this first hand with BEP). You don’t need to be good to enjoy a game and you can latch onto things people get excited about.”
–Thinking about this, I don’t know that it’s always the case. I remember whenever Carnevil would run Wrack by previewers who would get pretty much trashed by its easiest levels, they’d never mention the things that make Wrack unique — the arcade game like structure with lives, checkpoints, and continues fed with a combo-based scoring system (complete with score extends) reminiscent of the DonPachi series, and level design inspired by old platformers with a heavier emphasis on movement than even old ’90s FPSs — and would portray it as “yet another modern Doom clone”, simply because they weren’t able to play it at a level where the score system could become meaningful. They were getting trashed even just trying to survive; getting aggressive and trying to string together combos was totally out of the question.

I suspect this ended up really hurting the game; it got a reputation as being “just another generic retro-shooter”, which really couldn’t have been further from the truth.

]]>Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by Kayinhttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-258582
Sun, 17 Sep 2017 13:12:07 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-258582This would be a decent plan outside the fact that almost no one releases demos because they almost universally lose money. Really in general there isn’t enough previews and reviews out there to cover ground well in any consistent way outside of people following people they can know match their tastes and skill well.

But yes it’s not a perfect analogy but it’s still the idea that you don’t need to be good at a thing to talk about a thing. I feel like without posting the video, Dean could have written a preview and no one would have been the wiser.

]]>Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by yaddayaddahttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-258530
Fri, 15 Sep 2017 23:59:14 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-258530“Don’t Games Journalists need to be Good at Games?

No. Absolutely not. “But if someone was bad at understanding movies or only watched kids movies, would you want them to review stuff?” Not the same thing. It’d be like saying only people who played in the NFL could comment on and critique NFL play. Which some people say, but most people agree is stupid. Knowledge and expertise do not necessarily imply skill.”

There is a big difference here between games critique versus NFL critique. We can quantify the expertise of an NFL critic. If we have the critic play some fantasy football we can get numbers indicating how good the critic’s analysis is, even if the critic can’t throw a spiral pass or sprint 100 yards.

If we were to put a clock on that Cuphead tutorial and had players try to speedrun it, then we could at least get some numbers indicating how readily the players can do the dexterity tests the game asks them to do. Then reviewers could post their time on the tutorial along with their reviews, developers could release the tutorial level as a demo so players’ could get their own times, and players could read reviews from reviewers with similar times in the tutorial. This way players can see what reviewers of a similar skill level to their own thought of a game.

]]>Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by Kayinhttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-258496
Sat, 09 Sep 2017 07:53:29 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-258496I know plenty of people my age who grew up on games from the NES who were never any good at platformers and still aren’t. Doubly true for a lot of older PC gamers. Platforming is -not- a foundational gaming skill (much to my frequent headaches) and goes increasingly less relevant, sadly. And I certainly know people of all ages who, while fans of games, are also bad at them.

Now remember, no review was ever written, because I’d agree with you on that. But with a preview? It’s surprising, but a lot of journalists who aren’t great at a genre can still manage a good preview (I’ve experienced this first hand with BEP). You don’t need to be good to enjoy a game and you can latch onto things people get excited about. It’s hard to be insightful about a preview because you really can’t be too critical while handling an incomplete product unless something is obviously deeply wrong. And a guy like Dean (Even according to himself) is the ideal preview but can swing it in a situation where he’s the only person at a trade show. While he might lack deep genre insight in this situation, he can still impart first hand information (Because knowledge from journalists isn’t just about expertise, it’s also about access) and write a piece that, while I normally wouldn’t bother reading but did because of all the hubbub going on, was kinda funny and informative. It sufficiently covered the topic while being open and honest.

I’d also say in my experience, while it doesn’t go as far as people as bad as Dean was in that video, I don’t generally see a ton of correlation between “Skill” and “Insight”. There’s some, but I know tons of people who can be very knowledgable about things they’re not very good at. A gulf of knowledge can exist even if the skill gulf is not quite as high (or maybe even inconsistent). Someone with lower skill but still high insight and knowledge is more likely to write things that will reflect the experiences of average players.

I don’t want to discredit skill here too much. I don’t think it’s essential to being a games journalist (but if you suck as much as Dean you better have the credentials elsewhere to back it up) but it is VALUABLE and I wish the industry had more money to make sure enough of those people were getting paid to cover things optimally. But there isn’t and I don’t see the video people are getting super mad about being anything to get mad about, even if it wasn’t an optimal situation.

]]>Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by Obscurahttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-258493
Fri, 08 Sep 2017 23:55:28 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-258493To me, the cringey part isn’t the tutorial (tbh, I’m not certain I’d have done any better on that tutorial; holy crap it’s unclear, and I’d have tried doing a “dash-then-jump” like a dash-jump in Mega Man X), but rather the horrible attempts at the first stage.

Aside from the obvious reasons why skill should matter (at least for someone reviewing a game — you’d look like an idiot in a console FPS, and I’d look like an idiot in Tekken, and neither of us should be reviewing the games we’d look like idiots in), how does someone who, presumably, has an interest in videogames and thus a wide variety of experience do so poorly in the genre that was the typical pack-in game genre in the 16 bit days, because it was so universal? Hell, aren’t the handheld Marios *still* 2D platformers? If you have little experience with videogames, then what could you write about that would be new or insightful to your audience?

Also, I don’t feel that “Also the consumer of game reviews are not necessarily great videogame players. For the average gamer, the opinion of an expert is just as far from their perspective as a poor player.” is a very good argument. A gulf of knowledge between the professional critic vs. the average consumer in any medium is going to be just as large as the gap between the average consumer vs. the guy who isn’t into that medium at all. That knowledge pool is exactly why we seek out critics in the first place — to get the opinion and insight of the guy who knows more than us.

]]>Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by Kayinhttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-258490
Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:42:04 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-258490I think the trap to avoid is thinking about this as “the game did something wrong”. Because the tutorial functions. It educates players. But the question is is always “Can I do this better?” and I think that in that tutorial? Yes. You could do a lot better without driving yourself crazy with a ton of work.

I’m gonna guess the tutorial in the finished game is much different. Not just because of this but because it seems like it was made for the con so I think even they know it’s not the best it can be.

]]>Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by PJhttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-258489
Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:24:49 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-258489I agree that tutorial is not terribly important to artistic integrity or whatever…

But I think this one is perfectly fine. It was actually succesful at teaching this guy the jump-dash mechanic. He beat the tutorial. Sure, it probably took him longer than you would expect, but two minutes is not terribly long. I think “WTH” reaction is perfectly reasonable in that case, this tutorial really isn’t rocket science.

I do agree with your general point, but in this particular instance I think the game really didn’t do anything wrong :P

]]>Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by Kayinhttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-258487
Thu, 07 Sep 2017 22:39:53 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-258487So my question when this happened which would change the context is “Did the guy write anything about the game”. And he did write a quick preview — where he said “oh my god I suck at this game here is the video of me sucking at the game but then going out of his way to give as much information as he could. So it was very forward. It’s not like Dean got caught writing something and people found evidence of him being bad in a way that made original article terrible. IT seems like Dean is mostly a tech journalist and hitting Cuphead was probably more a matter of logistics than anything. You don’t get to send your best people to try every game at a convention, there are too many factors (and heck, I’ve experienced this first hand, having journalists who were bad at platforming play and write a quick fluff piece of BEP).

So I kinda agree with you but this isn’t really that kinda situation.

As for the Mario Maker stuff, I will say that bad player FOOTAGE is WAAAAAAY more valuable than bad player feedback. Even good player feedback can spotty at times!

]]>Comment on That Video of that Journalist Failing at Cuphead by Chrishttps://kayin.moe/?p=3191&cpage=1#comment-258482
Thu, 07 Sep 2017 09:22:38 +0000https://kayin.moe/?p=3191#comment-258482I need to challenge this point at least a little bit.

If a game journalist can’t get past a certain point early on in a video game, how will they know if the rest of the game is actually fun?

Oh wait, this doesn’t typically happen with modern games now does it? Yeah fuck the game industry…No that’s not fair, fuck the people who play games that are idiotically uncomplicated…and then fuck the game industry for logically capitalizing on that! (Yeah that makes sense, sorta).

I mean I watched the beginning part of the video, and I don’t really disagree with most of what you said. BUT! I do remember an interesting thing I read relating to the first Mario & Luigi game for GBA. For the sake of making my point, I’ll assume any future readers haven’t played that game. I forgot the specifics but a certain reviewer (reviewers? I think it was IGN but I’m not gonna go looking for it) were complaining a LOT about the jump rope minigame that you HAVE to play (and complete) right near the beginning of the game. People were (reasonably) saying in response to that, “I bet they couldn’t actually get past that jump rope mini-game. Which if that was actually the case, means they would NOT have been able to talk about any of the more advanced combat or truly unusual platforming elements that the game introduced. (The former of which gets fairly interesting pretty quickly after that jump rope game)

I’m pretty sure the review ended up being fairly worthless.

There’s obviously other implications here, (most of which you already talked about at great length) but since it was a GBA game, its not like they could patch that one part to be easier or anything. (The review was PROBABLY after the game was released to the general public)

So yeah, IF the game industry does eventually swing back to having “classic” difficulty for most video games, a basic to intermediate level of competence would probably actually be necessary if you want to REVIEW the game properly. I guess it can SLIGHTLY work in reverse too though. If someones “review” basically just says the game is REALLY hard. I personally might think, “huh, maybe I should look into this”. But it wouldn’t necessarily tell me anything constructive beyond that. It wouldn’t tell me if the game evolves in any interesting ways later, or if it stays fun throughout.

Obviously feedback from bad players can be relevant. But its also inherently less useful by itself. My Mario Maker levels were CLEARLY too difficult for the general player base. But on the flipside, besides mentioning the difficulty, their feedback was 90% worthless… These were random people on the internet, not “professionals” though. That didn’t stop me from making the levels even HARDER… but to be fair, I wasn’t selling them for money. I guess you know about this more than I would though. But I wanted to rant!

]]>Comment on On Level Design: A Macro Map design and some Ecology! by Kayinhttps://kayin.moe/?p=494&cpage=1#comment-258158
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 01:11:34 +0000http://kayin.pyoko.org/?p=494#comment-258158Yeah AM2R was really good. I had my quibbles with it (… does a game designer play a game and not have quibbles?) but it was a much better offering I’d say than even Zero Missions (and much better than fusion).

Federation Force doesn’t look like anything I’d be interested in, metroid label or no so that’s a hard pass.

Metroid 2 remake… I didn’t like the look of it from the trailer (though it didn’t look horrible, I was just like ‘eh’) and then I found out Mercury Steam is working on it which is like the kiss of death for any hype I might have had. So basically I’m going to pretend it’s not a thing unless it happens to be super great and everyone assures me it’s super great (or, more specifically, the right people assure me it’s great). I got no interest getting on that game early. It could totally be super great but nothing I’ve seen or heard has given me much confidence but… I rarely get hyped for upcoming games always so that doesn’t mean much. So basically “Wait and see” which is my default reaction to everything.